The Drowned Vault (24 page)

Cyrus Smith wiped his eyes and stared out at the small boat bobbing in the waves. He could see Nolan perched in the bow, watching the water. And then Rupert Greeves erupted through the surface, grabbed the side of the boat, heaved himself in, and peeled a black squid off his face. The water must have been frigid. He wasn’t sure how Rupert could survive as many dives as he had already taken.

“Hey.”

Cyrus swung around, suddenly grateful his eyes were dry. Diana Boone dropped onto the rock next to him and tossed him his jacket. She was wearing one of hers. Wool peeked up around her neck at the collar. Her hair was folded on top of her head. Freckles dotted her profile.

“Thanks,” Cyrus said. He swung the jacket on.
Boxing monkey, black ship, three heads. He felt warmer immediately. “Leather really cuts the wind, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” said Diana. “But that’s not cow leather. That’s goatskin. Old school.”

Cyrus studied Rupert. The big man was talking to Nolan. A moment later, he grabbed a new squid from a bucket and went back over the side.

“He brought squid,” Cyrus said.

Diana laughed. “He ordered squid. And dragonflies. The Livingstones brought them. And a lot of other things, too. Apparently we’re rallying here. I don’t know for how long.”

Cyrus looked down at his feet, tightly socked in spider silk. He wiggled his toes.

“That was really embarrassing back there.”

Diana smiled. “Which part? You got pretty sick in the plane before Arachne knocked you out. Rupe was flying low and fast.”

“Oh, gosh,” Cyrus said. “I don’t even remember that. I was thinking of the whole spider on the feet thing. In my defense, I was having a nightmare.”

Diana was nervously popping her knuckles. “In your defense, I think anybody waking up with spiders all over their feet would have screamed.” She glanced at him. “Maybe not as high as you did, but still …”

Cyrus groaned. The ache in his chest was dissipating.
“Where are we, by the way? As soon as I woke up, I got out of that little shed.”

Diana didn’t answer. She seemed lost, staring into the sky-racing clouds.

“Di?”

She jerked. “Sorry. The shed? That shed is our bunk-house. We’re on an island southeast of Nova Scotia.”

Cyrus nodded, then asked, “What’s going on? I mean, with you. Are you okay?”

Diana sighed. “I’m nervous,” she said. “And not about all this. Oh, I know, the transmortals are going crazy and they’ve dropped the paper dragons and they want to kill you and Tigs and Rupe and Phoenix. And Phoenix is out there somewhere with the tooth doing psycho things to people, and the O of B is falling apart as fast as it possibly can, and we’re on the run. But that’s just adventure, I guess. Or something like it.”

“So … what then?” Cyrus asked. Diana looked back out to sea. Nolan was boating toward the cliff.

“My parents,” she finally said. “They’re coming here. My mom and dad.” She glanced at Cyrus. “My dad’s intense. He was Avengel before Rupe, and the stuff he’s done and seen … he never talked to me about it, but my older brothers did. I don’t think I’ve seen my dad smile since I was a kid. Even Jeb shuts up around him. They usually keep to the wilds, but now Rupe says they’re coming here, and I’m all eaten up with nerves.”

Cyrus had no idea what to say. He didn’t understand. Diana looked away.

“Silly, right? And then I feel horrible that I’m nervous. I do want to see them. I do. It’s just nothing has ever impressed my dad. Nothing I’ve done has ever made him happy. You think I’m awful?”

Cyrus shook his head. But how excited would he be if he could see his father again? If he could see his mother smile and walk and laugh, if he could feel her arms around him? His eyes were hot just at the thought.

“Yes, I am,” Diana said. “You know why I’ve always liked you and your sister? No parents. You were on your own. Like me. But it wasn’t your fault. It
is
my fault. I’ve always been running away.”

“Maybe stop,” said Cyrus. “Running.”

“Cy!”

Cyrus turned around. Antigone was picking her way toward the cliff edge between gray boulders and towering fir trees. The red-winged blackbird was gliding from branch to branch behind her. Cyrus smiled and clicked his tongue at the bird. She warbled back.

“How are the feet?” Antigone asked.

“Cold,” said Cyrus. “Kinda numb. Silky.”

Antigone burst out laughing. “I can’t believe how much you screamed. Even after Arachne knocked you out again, though then it was more like you were gargling.”

“Har, har,” Cyrus said. “Like you would have done better.”

“True. But the thing is, Rus-Rus”—Antigone slid onto the rock beside him, nearly knocking him off—“when I scream like a girl, at least I am, actually, a girl.”

Diana laughed. Cyrus looked down at the water. The boat was gone.

“Any idea what we’re doing here?” he asked.

“Rupe will tell us soon enough,” Antigone said. She stood up again. “He’ll beat us back in the boat. I was supposed to get you for dinner.”

Cyrus lowered his silk-socked feet to the rough ground. Diana and Antigone were both in boots.

“Who’s cooking?” Diana asked. “Not Jax or Dennis, I hope.”

“Alan Livingstone,” Antigone said. “And he’s using the biggest pan I’ve ever seen.”

Cyrus watched his feet as he walked. He could feel the rough edges of stone, but they were somehow softened.

He placed his foot on a sharp stick and tested it with his weight. Even in his canvas shoes, he would have felt a little pain. Instead, the point of the stick bent and snapped beneath him. And the weave was watertight, too. When he squelched across wet moss, the water beaded up on his feet and slid away. Inside, his feet were dry.

His spider socks might have looked like ballet shoes, but they were as tough as combat boots.

“Oh, that’s a good smell,” Diana said.

Cyrus looked up and sniffed. Eggs. Cheese. Sausage. Mushrooms. Maybe bacon. And he could hear the sizzling. Up ahead, between two broken-down bunkhouses, Dennis and Jax and Arachne were sitting on old logs, watching Big Alan Livingstone work a massive skillet over a fire. He looked back over his shoulder and grinned inside his blond beard. His left nostril had two little stitches where it met his cheek. His sons, George and Silas, were slicing onions and peppers and meat over the pan, while their father snow-plowed it all around with a long spatula.

Cyrus dropped onto a log and watched the big man work. Rupert had wanted the Sages to name Alan as the Brendan. It was hard to imagine the Brendan being this kind of guy, his nostril stitched on, cheerfully scrambling eggs for a bunch of kids. Of course, maybe that’s why Rupert had wanted him. He was big and dangerous, but he was jolly.

“Mouths wanted!” Alan boomed. “Too much wealth in that pan for just the six of us!” He began to hum. “Chicken gifts and udder gold … Silas, grab the peri peri. In my bag. Left side.”

Silas hurried away.

“You three, grab a log,” Alan said. “Coming off hot, and hotter soon enough.”

Rupert and Nolan came through the trees on the other
side of the campfire. Rupert was bare-chested and toweling off as he walked. Cyrus couldn’t help staring at his scars. They were as stark as they had been in his dream.

“Will these eggs light my belly on fire?” Rupert asked, smiling.

“Only on the inside, Rupert Greeves,” Alan said. “Just like your mama used to make.”

“Cheers, mate,” Rupert said, sitting down. “It’s been too long.” He looked at Cyrus. “How are your feet?”

“Good,” said Cyrus. He smiled at Arachne. “Great, actually. Thanks. Sorry I lost it.”

Arachne didn’t smile back. “The Angel Skin will be much harder. You will have to be still.”

Cyrus nodded, not knowing what she was talking about and not much caring to find out. Silas was dusting red powder all over the eggs while his father stirred it in. George was assembling a stack of wooden platters and forks.

When the platters were passed around, heavy with eggs and cheese and bacon shards and diced sausage, Cyrus dug in without another thought in his head. It was spicy but not scorching, and warmth spread through his limbs as he ate. Platters were reloaded until Alan’s bathtub pan was empty of all but the shrapnel of the fried meal. Nolan sat on the ground beside it, picking out egg shards one at a time.

Rupert dropped his platter on the pine needles and slid down beside it, leaning his back against the log.

“Right,” he said. “Cyrus, we let this settle, and then we dive.”

Silas Livingstone was rubbing his scarred eyebrow. George was splayed out beside him. “Find what you were looking for?” Silas asked. His father shot him a look. “Mr. Greeves,” Silas added quickly.

“Not yet,” Rupert said, “I need a little time, and a few dives. We’ll move again soon.”

“I think we should lie low,” Diana said. “And this is as good a place as any. Let the transmortals and Phoenix go at it. When the dust settles, we can fight the weakened survivor.”

Rupert pulled a knife from his boot and peeled a long strip of bark off a stick.

“Miss Diana Boone, you give the same advice your father did. And it’s good advice. He was born a trapper, and that means patience. But hanging back and waiting in ambush has its own risks. The dust might not settle how we’d like.” He studied the stick in his hand. “What if the
Ordo
and Phoenix come to terms? Imagine Gilgamesh and Phoenix on the same side.”

“Gil wouldn’t do that,” Arachne said. “He hates wizards and flesh changers.” She hadn’t eaten anything. Her spider bag was empty on her lap. Cyrus wondered how many of them were feasting in bushes all around him right now.

Nolan laughed and lobbed a pinecone into the low
fire. “You haven’t known him long, have you? A wizard and a flesh changer is exactly what old Gilgamesh of Uruk is.” He began to pick at a scratch on his forearm. Getting his nails in deep, he peeled the skin off like a wet sock. It reached his wrist, then he tugged it off his hand and his fingers, and was then holding a long, translucent glove of human skin. He let it float toward the fire. “Gil knows how to sling a curse.”

“You stole from him,” Arachne said. “He could have done worse.”

Nolan cocked his head and sent her a glare.

“Ho, now,” Alan said. “Old stories, old wounds, no need to claw them now. What Gil does, he does, but Rupe is right. If the
Ordo
can’t stomp out Phoenix, they’ll find a truce.”

“Can I ask a question?” Antigone asked. “Something I’ve wondered.”

Everyone looked at her.

“If there are teams, why are Nolan and Arachne on ours?” She hurried to explain. “I mean, I like you both. But I don’t understand. You’re transmortals. The O of B made a whole bunch of rules that all the other transmortals hated. Now they got rid of them, but you’re still with us. Why? Just ’cause you’re nice and they’re not, or what?”

Nolan sat up slowly, smiling. Then he began to laugh.

Arachne scrunched up her face. “The others don’t
understand, either,” she said. Her eyes widened, flashing ice. “But some of them are quite nice.”

“To you,” Nolan mumbled.

“So …,” Cyrus said. “What’s the answer?”

Arachne sighed. “We—neither of us—ever wanted the change. Maybe we would have, but we weren’t given the choice. It just happened. It was done to us.” She looked at Nolan. “Gilgamesh dove for the fruit of life at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Nolan was the starving son of a fisherman who found him floating.”

Nolan stirred the pine needles on the ground beside him. “I ate because I was hungry. Because I thought he was dead. Why would I let a dead man’s fruit go to waste? When he woke, he couldn’t kill me, though he tried. He gave me my curse.”

Cyrus studied the pale boy from the Polygon. Nolan looked up at him, and his eyes were heavy and more worn than ever.

“And you,” Antigone said to Arachne shyly. “There was a story we read in school about you. The book said you were in a weaving contest with Minerva, and when she couldn’t beat you, she smashed your loom and turned you into a spider.”

Arachne’s face softened and her eyes drifted away, focusing on something only she could see. “Ovid lied in that poem. I never wanted that contest. Minerva was one of the undying, part demon, part witch. I had only the
gift of sight and a little magic in my fingers. She wagered her life against mine and bound us with terrible spells. I had no choice but to weave. But she had cursed my loom—the frame split, and the threads could not hold my weave.

“Desperate for my life, I cast prayers into the sky, to the one who wove the world. And my prayers were heard. For the first time, spiders came to me. They were my loom and my silk, and as I wove, holy power flowed through me, a touch reserved for creatures outside this world. What I wove shimmered like a pond at dawn, and in it a sun rose and set, and men and women moved as if alive. I wove them voices of holiness to curse Minerva and her kind, and to sing of the beauty that once was in the world and that would come again like morning.”

Arachne looked up. “That day, Minerva died. Now I never can. And from the moment the judges—kings and priests and wizards—looked on my tapestry, I was hunted. Men searched me out for charms, cloaks, strength, and healing, for beauty and power. For centuries I would hide, but they would always find me. When the Order bound me, I found protection. Often I have sheltered in Brendan’s Estates.”

She glanced at Nolan. “We two still feel like mortals, like death was stolen from us. We are like you, the dying. Not like Gil or the Vlads or Radu or Semiramis or even Ponce—those who fought against their own mortality.”

George Livingstone adjusted his short blond bulk on the ground. “So … you want to die?”

Arachne nodded. Her ancient blue eyes were lightless and still. And then, slowly, a sun rose within them. She smiled at George. “Just not today. See, I am like every other mortal.”

Nolan climbed to his feet, watching loose pine needles slide off his trousers. His face and body still belonged to a boy, but to Cyrus, he seemed as burdened as the oldest man. When he spoke, his voice was low. “There are things on the other side of death that we may never see. Thirsts we may never quench. Tastes these mouths cannot consume. But down here, under the sun, there is nothing new.”